When the economy is making all of us nervous, we start looking for ways to make the most of every click and every lead.

Here are the tools that help you close more sales by utilizing your current tricks and contacts, i.e. without investing more in marketing:

1. Walnut.io: Make the Most of Your Product Demos

Product demos are the most powerful sales tools. But they are also the most challenging tools because they often require design skills and live presentations. The result is often unpredictable making it difficult to identify what went wrong with different prospects and how to improve your process.

Walnut is an innovative tool that helps sales reps create personalized and interactive product demos that close deals.

Its key features include:

• Create personalized and engaging product demonstrations for each prospect.
• Put together ready-to-go product demo templates by use case that are quick to reuse and publicize.
• Guide prospects easily with interactive annotations.
• Use built-in analytics to identify what works well and where you are losing sales.
• Work faster by integrating all your demo data with your CRM.

In a nutshell, Walnut allows you to increase product demo conversions. It makes your tool more productive by allowing them to reuse demos and focus on what works. It also makes it easier to convince larger decision making units because you can send all your prospects a link to an interactive demo that will help them understand your product value proposition.

2. DealHub: Make the Most of Every Lead or Prospect

DealHub is a deal acceleration platform that helps sales teams sell more with the help of smart technology. It offers tools that make it easier to generate proposals and quotes, and helps teams stay organized and connected, all while syncing data with your Salesforce or HubSpot CRM. 

While other Configure Price Quote (CPQ) solutions require extensive coding and ongoing maintenance, DealHub can be easily configured using code-free settings, to ensure everyone on your sales team gets what they need out of it. The platform also includes tools to help teams analyze and understand the sales process and customer behavior. 

All of this is designed to help teams be more efficient and productive, and to give buyers a better experience.

DealHub’s key features are:

• Guided Selling Playbooks are tools that help salespeople create accurate quotes, sales materials, and legal contracts. 
• Contract Lifecycle Management helps manage contracts, their progress, as well as handle electronic signatures and storage. 
• DealRooms are virtual spaces where buyers and sellers can work on deals, and see each other’s actions in real-time. 
• The Sales Workspace is a place where sales teams can see their own completed and outstanding tasks, as well as analytics (what works well and what yields no results) all in one place. 
• The Open Data Platform makes it easy to connect with other sales tools and share data.

Dealhub makes it easy to work with large decision making units and adjust your process to each stakeholder.

DealHub is a sales tool that helps teams work more smoothly and efficiently. It helps leaders connect with their teams and manage sales pipelines, all the way through to e-signatures and subscription billing payments. DealHub also helps teams keep track of interactions with leads and stay organized throughout the whole sales process.

3. Nextiva

Cross-platform marketing automation software allows you to track the behavior of your visitors. You know, of course, that not everyone who visits your website is ready to do business.

But there’s no way to know just how interested (or disinterested) they are unless you have at disposal a tool that points out the content they have consumed on the website, the resources they have downloaded, the number of newsletters they have subscribed to, how often they have visited the website, and how many times have they checked out your products/services in earnest (by going all the way to the check-out page).

Your leads may be at various stages of buying, but with access to the data points listed above, you will be able to send targeted messages to them depending on where they are and the next steps that you want them to take. Carefully crafted emails, content experiences and social media messages can be compelling and give them just the nudge needed to make a purchase!

Nextiva is a smart platform for businesses of all sizes to capture and convert leads. Nextiva is at the top of their game with software that promises to help businesses manage leads and market to them in a targeted and structured way across channels.

Related Articles

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• Unlocking the Secrets to Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent in Your Agency

So much of marketing is about nurturing leads and keeping them interested season after season as they keep visiting your website. Some might never make a purchase. Others might be waiting for the right moment.

With Nextiva, you can attract the right customers and keep them engaged. Its SEO tool analyzes the performance of your existing keywords and recommends more competitive ones to improve your web ranking. Its “engagement platform” helps you collect rich customer behavior data, which can be integrated with social media platforms to create targeted ads.

Nextiva also helps you engage visitors with personalized content (based on their browsing behavior and data derived from the visitors’ location) to keep them interested. 

If you’re emphasizing account-based marketing (ABM) practices, you can even manually create an audience segment of VIP leads from your email list and surface different content experiences to people visiting your site from these companies.

With the help of a tool like Nextiva, you gain insights into the behavior of your visitors/customers, zero in on the right ones and send them personalized content, improve your Google search rankings (so that more of the relevant people can find you), and make social media an integral part of the marketing mix.

After all, it doesn’t matter how someone found you, as long as they have found you and are interested in your website. Your marketing efforts should be able to direct traffic to your website from whatever platforms (including social media channels) you have a presence on.

Nextiva has separately priced plans for their various services. You have to get in touch with them for pricing.

4. Leadfeeder: Turn Visitors into Leads

Leadfeeder is a specialized B2B automation tool that helps businesses weed out the time wasters and focus on promising leads – even when people who visit your site don’t opt in via any of your lead capture forms. This is one of the most effective organic B2B lead generations tools out there allowing you to make the most of your current positions.

Its integration with Google Analytics helps the tool glean data that is worth its weight in gold. Leadfeeder’s code isn’t slowing web pages down so it is perfect for speed optimization.

With Leadfeeder, you can find out exactly which businesses have visited your website, as well as the specific landing pages they visit and for how long. (If they are in your target demographic and have seen the product demo or checked out the pricing, you know a sales call might be in order).

Procuring details on these companies is easy and helps marketers qualify leads. Leadfeeder also offers lists of email addresses, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles associated with people who work at these companies, so that your marketing team can organize contacts according to priority. Then, salespeople can warm up leads across channels and make calls to pitch when the time is right.

What makes Leadfeeder even more useful is its integration with a number of popular marketing tools, such as Salesforce, MailChimp, Zoho, Pipedrive and webCRM. With the help of Zapier, which Leadfeeder rolled out an integration with in late June, you can now push Leadfeeder data to hundreds of other platforms, like Google Sheets, AdRoll, Todoist, Slack, and several more CRMs.

Making your sales team more effective is the first step to increasing your ROI and surviving an economic crisis. I hope the tools above will help you close more sales and build a foundation for future success!

The post Four Sales Tools To Use During This Economic Downturn appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

As advertisers, we focus a lot of our energy on ensuring our ad campaigns are performing and converting as best as they possibly can.

But that’s only one part of the equation. 

What happens after the click is just as important (if not more important!)

You can have the most incredible ad campaign set-up, but if the funnel you’re sending traffic to doesn’t convert, it doesn’t matter how great your campaign is – you simply won’t see the results you desire.

And so, in this article, I’m going to share 7 ways you can improve the conversion rate of your funnel, leading to better overall performance and results. 

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1. Include the 3 Argument Types on Each Page

Whenever someone makes a buying decision, they use two different parts of their brain. 

There’s the emotional part (the limbic brain) and the logical part (the frontal lobe). It’s important to understand this because it plays a big role in how we structure the pages in our funnel.

When humans make a purchasing decision, it’s mainly an emotional reaction. A study by a Harvard School of Business Professor, Gerald Zaltman, concluded that 95% of purchase decisions are made by the limbic system (the emotional part).

We see something, like it and decide we want it. Once we’ve decided we want something, the frontal lobe then helps sway us on whether we actually buy the thing by processing it logically. 

Think about someone buying their dream house. 

They go to view the house and fall in love with it instantly and decide they want to buy it – that’s the limbic brain. It’s only when they get home and start looking at things like the area, electricity bills, neighbourhood and all the other bits that they start thinking about the purchase logically. 

And so, when it comes to our marketing (and our funnel specifically), we need to understand this as it impacts how we should structure the pages.

Regardless of the type of page you’re sending people to (whether it’s a lead gen funnel or e-commerce) you need to be making three types of arguments:

Emotional arguments

Logical arguments

Urgency

And we want to make them in this order too – since that’s the order in which someone makes a purchasing decision. 

Have your emotional arguments at the top of the page, above the fold. What are the emotional reasons someone would purchase your product? It can often be as simple as saving time, stress or money. 

As you move down the page, you can start talking about the logical arguments. These are often features and benefits. What would someone need to know/understand in order to purchase the product or service?

And lastly, for good measure – always include urgency in your messaging to further push those people to take action. There are people out there that simply won’t take action unless you give them a reason to take it now. Some good ways to do this are: Give them a certain timeframe, warn them about limited stock or simply talk about why it’s so important they take action now.

By doing this you’re structuring the pages in a way that flows with how we make purchasing decisions as human beings – setting you up for the best chance of success. 

2. Benefits > Features

There’s a common saying in the copywriting world: “features tell, benefits sell.”

However, when most come to write copy for their product/service, they write about all the features without explaining the benefits. 

Features focus on the product/service itself. Such as what you receive, what it does or how it works. 

Some examples of features are:

• Storage up to 1TB
• Access to a free Facebook group
• Latest waterproof technology

Those things are great, but they don’t tell the end consumer the benefit to them, which makes it less compelling. 

Benefits focus on the outcome of the product/service, telling the customer exactly what the feature will mean for them. Bringing it back to the first point – this is how we start to build emotion into our copy.

By telling people what a feature means to them, they start to visualise themselves using it – which creates the emotional reaction we need.

Luckily for you, I’ve got a super simple way to turn your features into benefits.

The “So That” Statement

This is a tactic I use every single time I write copy. 

If you’re like most people and tend to write about the features, simply add the words “so that” to the end of your sentence. This forces you to explain the benefit that’s tied to the feature, making your copy much more hard-hitting.

The formula you can use is: 

If ___ so that you can ___.

Let’s take our examples from above.

• Storage up to 1TB so that you can save all your files without ever worrying about running out of space.
• Get access to our free Facebook group so that you can network with like-minded individuals. 
• The latest waterproof technology so that you can hike out in the rain for longer without getting wet feet.

Review all your copy and ensure every feature is combined with the real benefit. This will make your copy much more emotionally driven and compelling to anyone that’s reading it.

3. Split Test All Pages

The key to success in any advertising campaign is comprehensive testing. Testing images, copy, creative types and audiences. But the importance of testing doesn’t stop at the advertising campaign – it’s just as important to continuously test the pages in your sales funnel. 

You should test at least 2 variants of every page in your sales funnel. Tests can be big or small, from having completely different designs to changing the colours of a button. It doesn’t matter what you test so much. The most important thing is just that you are testing… because that allows you to learn what works and what doesn’t. 

And like all great marketers do: do more of what works and do less of what doesn’t. 

Things You Can Test at Each Stage of the Sales Funnel

• Headline/Subtitle – this is arguably the most important thing to test because it’s the first thing people see and read when they land on a page. Little changes in a headline can have a huge impact on conversion rates. The headline is where you want your biggest emotional argument on the page.
• Main Image/Video – most funnel pages will have imagery or videos on them. This is another key thing to test out. Try different styles of images and videos to see which ones perform better, such as professionally designed images vs iPhone shot photos.
• Sales Copy – try testing different features and benefits. Even testing the order in which you share the features can make a difference. If you’re listing benefits in bullet point format, the first and last bullets are the most important.
• Call to Action – the copy you use on the button can make a huge impact on performance. Try ditching the boring “Learn more” and try something more unique such as “Get Started – See How 97% Lose Weight In Just 30 Days”

Upsells/Cross-sells – test different offers throughout your funnel to see which products/offerings people find more compelling.

Get the Digital Marketing Blueprint…

With a Customer Value Journey that strategically builds a relationship with new prospects and converts them into loyal, repeat customers. Click here

4. Improve Average Order Value with Offers

The success of a campaign isn’t always just based on the conversion rate of the campaigns and funnels. Sometimes it can come down to how much money people are spending on your funnel.

You can have a funnel that converts, but if the money being made isn’t providing good levels of profit on top of ad spend, you have a problem. 

We recently worked with an e-commerce store that sold home gifts. We managed to optimise the campaigns so successfully that we were able to get our cost per sale down to less than £5. However, because the average order value of the site was only £15, the ROAS wasn’t sustainable. 

In order for us to make the campaigns successful overall, we had to improve the conversion rate of the site – specifically focussing on increasing the Average Order Value (how much someone spends per transaction, on averageGavin Bel). 

To do this, we added in what is called order bumps and one-time offers.

An order bump is an offer made at the checkout, right before someone hits the pay button. A common order bump might be to “supersize” the order for a reduced rate or to get another product at a low price. These convert extremely well.

A one-time offer is what it says on the tin.

Once someone has made a purchase, another offer appears on the screen inviting them to purchase a related product at a discounted price.

Adding both of these increased the AOV of our client’s site by 20%, vastly improving the campaign’s overall effectiveness. Even if AOV isn’t a problem for you, look at adding these two tactics to improve it.

By not doing it, you’re essentially leaving money on the table!

5. Improve the Quality of Traffic on the Page

If your funnel isn’t converting, it might simply be because you’re attracting the wrong people in the first place.

You can have the best funnel and offer in the world, but if the people visiting it aren’t relevant, it’ll never convert. This is why it’s so important to ensure you’re performing lots of campaign tests – testing which audiences work and which ones don’t. 

With all of the advertising platforms, it’s very easy to see which audiences are bringing in the best returns. And like I mentioned earlier, simply do more of what’s working and turn off what’s not.

There is one fool-proof way of ensuring you’re only getting the highest quality people to your sales funnel: content creation.

Creating content is one of the most effective ways to attract an audience of people who definitely have an interest in what you offer and it’s something we advise every single client to do – either in written or video format. 

The biggest objection we face is “but I don’t know what to write about?!”

And so if that’s you, I’ve got you covered. 

The simplest way to start creating effective content is to simply answer the questions, objections and queries your customers have. 

Here’s how to approach it:

1. Create a list of all the questions you’re asked as a business (get your team involved in this)
2. Turn those questions into eye-catching headlines
3. Sit down in front of a camera and record the answers (or write them up)

This is so effective for two reasons:

1. Only people who are genuinely interested in what you do will consume the content
2. When you promote the content through advertising, it’s super cheap because you’re not selling anything, you’re providing value. 

Pretty quickly,  you start to build a large audience of people who have an interest in your offering.

Let’s say you’re a physiotherapist. You could film a 60s video titled “5 reasons you have back pain”. You could then set up a basic ad campaign targeting people in your local area (that fit your basic customer avatar).

Who’s going to watch that video? 

People in the local area who have back pain!

Which, for a physiotherapist, is the perfect audience. What’s better is, these people are qualified AND educated. They know who the physiotherapist is already (building trust) and making them much more likely to take action and convert.

And to supercharge this strategy, you could run retargeting ads to the people who watched the video, pushing them to your sales funnel.

6. Increase or Decrease form Friction

When it comes to lead generation funnels, there’s a fine line between lead quantity and lead quality.

It’s not hard to generate lots of leads at a low cost, but it is difficult to generate lots of QUALIFIED leads at a low cost. 

It’s a constant balancing act, ensuring that you have both quality and quantity. 

The best way to strike the balance is to simply increase or decrease the fields you have in the form. 

This increases or decreases the friction that someone has to go through in order to convert. The more questions/fields, the higher the friction. The fewer fields, the lower the friction. 

If you’re struggling with lead quality, try and add some more fields to the form, specifically around the main reason your quality is low. For example, if you find the people you speak to aren’t motivated, add a “how motivated are you?” question. 

If you’re not getting enough leads, try reducing the number of questions in the form and monitor what impact that has. 

Whenever we’re starting a new campaign, we will always start with fewer fields to make sure we generate as many leads as possible. And then if we feel like we need to improve the quality of the leads, we’ll start slowly adding more fields to the form.

7. Include Social Proof Throughout

If there’s one thing that stops people from converting in a funnel, it’s a lack of trust. 

A lack of trust in the people behind the funnel, the offer itself or the promise the funnel is making. 

So, how do you build trust with people? How do you show them that your offer is legitimate and will have an impact on their lives?

Show the results that other people have achieved. 

Everyone in the world has problems. And they have desired results. 

Your job as a marketer is to show people how your product/service is a bridge from their problems to their desired results.

And the most effective way to do that is by showing the stories of others who have successfully achieved that with your product/service.

Social proof can take the form of: case studies, testimonials and even quotes from previous customers and people who have already converted through the funnel. The more you can share, the better. 

Even better – if you can have your social proof cover the main objections you know people have when converting, your social proof will do some of the selling for you!

Wrapping Up…

Improving the funnel conversion rate can have a drastic effect on the performance of your overall campaigns and business. If you’re able to get your funnel and ad campaigns to a point where they are profitable, you can scale your spend quickly. 

Start implementing some of these strategies and I guarantee that you’ll see improvements in your overall results.

Let me know – have you tried any of these? Which was the most effective for you?

The post 7 Ways To Improve The Conversion Rate Of Your Funnel appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

There are three primary temperatures of traffic. It’s important to think about each type as you build your digital marketing strategy. If you’ve heard Ryan Deiss talk about how dating and marketing are similar, you’ll get these right away. If not…keep reading! You’ll see how easy it is to turn cold leads into hot leads.

What Is Cold Traffic?

Someone who knows nothing about your product is a cold lead. Honestly, a cold lead might not even recognize they have a problem. If they are aware of a problem, they might not know a solution exists.

• Cold traffic isn’t ready to engage.
• Cold traffic isn’t ready to buy.
• Cold traffic might not even want to hear from you.

You might be thinking, “why waste my time and ad spend trying to win over someone who doesn’t even want to hear from me?” Because…they actually DO want to hear from you, they just don’t know it yet.

Marketing Is Relationship Building

I feel strongly that digital marketing is relationship building. Think about any new relationship. They all start out cold with what Ryan Deiss calls a glance. You see someone from across the room that looks interesting. They glance back. It’s just a moment.

What’s the next step? Go and introduce yourself. That’s what paid traffic does. It introduces your product to the prospect.

Know Your Target Audience

Before marketing to anyone, you should create a buyer persona. At Digital Marketer, we call it the Customer Avatar. Completing a Customer Avatar Canvas helps you know the prospect to a point where you know:

• What their goals are.
• What their pain points are.
• Their hobbies and interests.
• Where they hang out.
• Their dreams and plans.
• What keeps them up at night.

If your marketing speaks to those issues, you’ll start to turn that traffic into warm traffic.

What Is Warm Traffic?

At the warm traffic stage, prospects don’t need to know about you, your product, or your brand to be considered warm leads or warm traffic. They do, however, need to be aware that they have a problem.

Warm traffic is any potential customer who has identified an issue and they’re interested in having that issue addressed in some way.

Examples of warm traffic include:

• The minivan mom who realizes, “I need an oil change.”
• The newly wedded couple who decides, “We’re interested in buying a new house.”
• The overworked attorney who says, “I want to go to Tahiti.”

In other words, warm traffic is a potential customer who has identified a need.

What Is Hot Traffic?

Hot leads are the folks that are ready to go. You’ve “turned a glance into a stare,” as Ryan would say. You’ve introduced yourself and gotten the number. Now you’re ready for the first date!

• Hot traffic wants to engage.
• Hot traffic wants to subscribe.
• Hot traffic wants to convert.
• Hot traffic wants to buy!

As you might expect, this is the most valuable traffic. It’s also the most expensive.

How To Turn A Cold Lead Into A Hot Lead With Paid Traffic

Quality leads don’t flow into a business on accident. The lead generation strategy you put into place has to gradually warm them up. At the cold lead stage, your job as a marketer is to put the message in front of them. The Facebook ad, Google ads, or whatever, has to be something that’s attractive to them and captures their attention.

This all goes back to the Customer Avatar or buyer persona. You’ve got to know your target audience before you can craft a high-converting offer.

What Is A Sales Funnel?

The sales funnel is a concept that has been beaten to death. But it’s prerequisite to understand because it is a natural sequence. It is the way people think before they make a purchase.

You have to understand the sales funnel before you can get good at lead generation.

Why? For every single purchase you’ve ever made in your entire life, from buying a stick of gum to purchasing a house, you have unconsciously gone through this funnel.

Top Of The Sales Funnel: Awareness

At the very top of the sales funnel is awareness. Remember the cold lead who was blissfully unaware of the problem you provide a solution to? Well, they’ve just realized they have that problem. Now, the potential lead is aware and enters your sales funnel.

Example: “Ouch, my back hurts.”

Your solution might be spinal surgery, chiropractic care, or a pain relief cream. The warm lead now has a vague awareness of your participation in the solution.

Sometimes awareness starts inbound, like when your prospect goes to the search engines and asks a question.

In many cases, awareness can actually be catalyzed through outbound advertising. You could run Facebook ads that speak to back pain and ways to relieve it. (Due to Facebook compliance issues, be very careful what claims you make!)

You don’t have to wait around for people to become aware. You can create awareness with paid traffic. Once they are in the awareness stage, it’s your job to start driving them down to interest.

The Interest Stage

At the interest stage we use content videos, blogs, downloadable PDFs, etc. Whatever you think is going to engage your prospect and start getting the wheels turning.

• You want to establish authority
• You want to be the thought leader
• You want to be the trusted resource.

To do that, you should provide top quality content. Use the acronym “E-A-T” when you consider what kind of content to produce. EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

The content you create for your target audience will not only move them into the interest stage, but move them to the next level, which is consideration.

Warm Leads and Consideration

You’re one step closer to earning a qualified lead! At the consideration stage the warm lead is now willing to look at solutions. But that doesn’t mean they’re willing to look at your solution.

Consider all the options available. Referring back to our example, the potential customer has a whole spectrum of options. On one extreme is back surgery. On the other is a pain relief cream.

If you’re the authority and they trust you, they’ll trust you to begin prescribing what the solution could be. But please remember that prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.

What you should do in your funnels and with your content, is give people the opportunity to engage with your solution. Let them know that you understand what they’re going through. Let them know that you’ve overcome the issues they’re facing.

In other words, don’t put offers in front of them too soon.

Putting an offer at the consideration stage is too early. It’s like asking for marriage on the first date.

From the consideration stage, prospects move to intent.

The Intent Stage

This is the stage in the sales funnel when your potential lead decides to take action. As an example, someone knows they’re going to buy a car. At this stage, they need to figure out which car to buy.

The shift from intent to evaluation, the next stage in the sales funnel, is fairly fast. Why? I think people lack patience. We’re all used to immediate gratification. So moving people from intent to evaluation is generally easy.

From Evaluation to Purchase

Although the time between intent and evaluation is short, the shift requires tactical content. At this stage, your content marketing should be focused on creating content such as

• Features lists
• Pricing calculators
• Comparison charts
• How-to videos

The content you create should help the prospect make the most logical decision: to purchase your product.

Why Paid Advertising Trumps SEO

I hate to beat up on SEO. But the truth is with organic traffic, you’re at the mercy of the search engine. Who is searching for your product? What are they searching for? Where will the search engine place your product?

Another disadvantage of SEO is that it’s generally all top of the funnel.

The benefit of paid traffic is that you get to speak to people at every single stage of the funnel using paid ads. This isn’t true for other advertising mechanisms.

With paid traffic, you get to place your ads wherever you want.

Realize that the further down the funnel you go, the more expensive traffic becomes. That makes sense, right? At the bottom of the funnel people are ready to buy. In many cases, the hot lead has their wallet out, their credit card in hand, and they’re ready to click that “Buy Now” button.

“The Bottom Up Funnel”

My business partner, John Moran, coined the term “the bottom up funnel.” What we recommend is for marketers to start at the bottom of the funnel.

Think about all the steps in the funnel. It can be tedious to layout a content marketing strategy to meet all the needs of your potential customers. When you implement your marketing efforts at the top of the funnel, you spend a lot of time, effort, energy, and money to move cold leads down the sales funnel.

The push from awareness to interest to consideration can take months! From consideration to intent can take event longer. Think about buying a car. Once you decide which car you want to buy, you may have to research interest rates on loans, or you may want to save money for the down payment.

If you invest all your time and effort to drive people from the top of the funnel downward, they may get to the bottom of the funnel and you suddenly realize you marketed to the wrong buyer persona. They’re not the right fit! Or your price isn’t right. Or maybe the offer isn’t attractive enough.

Driving traffic to the top of the funnel first means you’re always learning the most important lesson last.

We want you to learn the most important lesson first.

It will be expensive. You’ll pay more in ad spend to learn that lesson. But when you learn the most important lesson first, you can slowly travel up the funnel. Once the sale has been made, you know what to say, what to charge, how to engage people and convert them into quality leads.

The best recommendation I can give you is to build your funnel from the bottom up. Start with the intent stage and work your way up. With all the benefits of paid traffic like speed, advanced analytics, laser-targeting, and optimization, your paid ad campaigns will be much more effective if you do.

Want to become a traffic master? Click here to find out how!

NOTE: This content came directly from DigitalMarketer’s Paid Traffic Mastery Certification.

The post Turn a Cold Lead To a Hot Lead with Paid Traffic appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

So it’s fair to say that SEO changes fast. 

Sure, many of the fundamentals of SEO (like optimizing your site’s on-page SEO and building backlinks) haven’t changed that much over the last few years. 

But there are a handful of significant changes to SEO that are worth paying attention to. In fact, ignoring these important changes can hurt your site’s ability to rank in Google.

And in this post I’ll outline 5 SEO changes that might be keeping your site from Google’s first page.

1. Google’s Emphasis on Core Web Vitals

Google has been using page loading speed as part of their algorithm for years.

But in 2021, Google stepped things up with what they call “Core Web Vitals”.

Core Web Vitals are a set of three factors that Google considers important for UX.

In other words: this new set of ranking factors doesn’t look at the quality of your content. Or the number of backlinks you have.

Instead, Core Web Vitals are all about how users interact with your site. 

Specifically, Core Web Vitals measure:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Essentially how long it takes for the majority of your page’s content to load.
• First Input Delay (FID): How long it takes before a user can interact with your page (for example, entering their username).
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much a page shifts during the loading process (less is better).

It’s not yet known how much Core Web Vitals impact rankings. But they are a confirmed ranking signal. So if you haven’t been working to improve your Core Web Vitals, it’s likely that your rankings are suffering because of it.

To get a baseline of where you’re at, you can check out your Core Web Vitals scores in Search Console. 

2. EAT Continues to Impact Health and Wellness Content

Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (EAT) is Google’s way of sizing up how much a specific piece of content (or an entire site) can be trusted.

For example, a site can have well-written content. Great Core Web Vitals. And plenty of backlinks.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the content is completely accurate. Or written by someone with specific knowledge on the subject. 

Which is why Google is relying more on signals that demonstrate high levels of EAT.

(Things like a site’s reputation, an author’s expertise, and transparency about any potential conflicts of interest).

While EAT likely applies to content about anything, Google likely puts much more emphasis on EAT for content about health. 

For example, Healthline might be the #1 health site online (in terms of organic traffic). 

They’re able to rank for so many competitive keywords largely due to their focus on EAT.

Every article is written or reviewed by a healthcare professional. And each piece is referenced based on data from reputable medical journals. 

3. Search Intent Becomes More Important

Google can easily measure how users interact with your site (assuming they land on your page from a Google search).

For example, let’s say a user clicks on the #1 result in Google. But they don’t find what they’re looking for. So they click “back” after 2 seconds.

That’s something Google can measure. And, if enough users have the same reaction to the top result, Google may demote that site lower down the page.

Which is why it’s super important that your page’s aren’t just keyword-optimized around a specific keyword. But that your page is optimized for what SEO professionals call “search intent”.

Search intent is essentially what a searcher wants from a given search. Sometimes they might want to get information on a topic. In other cases, a user may want to buy something.

And the more your content can align with that keyword’s search intent, the better you’ll tend to rank.

For example, we recently increased the organic traffic to the Exploding Topics blog by 37% simply by optimizing for search intent. 

Specifically, we looked at the keyword that each page was trying to rank for. Hypothesized what specifically that searcher would want to see. And tweaked our content to better match search intent. 

4. SERP Real Estate Becomes a Concern

Back in the day, you could basically estimate how much traffic you’d get from a keyword based on where you ranked.

So if you ranked #3 for a keyword with 1,000 searches per month, you could estimate that you’d get about 150 clicks per month.

It’s obviously better to rank higher up on Google’s first page. But things are far from that straightforward anymore.

That’s largely thanks to Google implementing dozens of new “SERP Features” over the past few years. 

SERP features are essentially elements that Google adds to the results. Elements that aren’t a traditional “10 blue link” organic result.

For example, check out the search results for this keyword:

There are several prominent ads. A “People also ask” box. And more.

Which is why many SEOs are focusing more on SERP real estate over traditional ranking positions.

Specifically, they’re looking at where their site actually appears in the search results. And optimizing for increased visibility.

For example, they might try to rank their site in the top 3. And also have one of their YouTube videos or Medium articles rank on the first page as well.

Others will avoid keywords that have too many SERP features. The idea being that it’s not worth trying to rank “#1” for a keyword when you’ll actually be halfway down the page.

5. SEOs Push to Optimize for CTR

Whether click-through-rate is an organic ranking signal is up for debate.

Some SEOs (myself included) think that Google uses it to figure out whether or not a result is something searchers are even interested in clicking.

Others see CTR as a “noisy” signal that doesn’t factor into rankings. 

But no matter where you stand on the issue, the fact remains that optimizing for CTR makes sense.

That’s because a higher CTR=more traffic. Even if your rankings don’t improve.

And, as outlined before, with organic clicks being eaten away by SERP features, improving your CTR is more important than ever before.

Fortunately, you don’t need to guess what pushes people to click on a specific result.

In general, pages with these attributes tend to have high CTRs:

• Uses a number in the title tag
• Has a unique description 
• Emphasizes content is new/recent
• Uses terms that grab attention (without being too clickbaity)

Conclusion

That wraps up my list of 5 important SEO changes to keep an eye on.

All of these changes are currently impacting SEO. But it’s important to point out that they’re all likely to become more important as time goes on.

So if you want to get higher rankings today, but also improve your rankings over the long-term, it’s worth optimizing around these new changes. 

The post The 5 Biggest Changes in SEO That Are Hurting Your Results appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Are you managing a B2B business that needs more leads?

If you’re still reading this, I bet you’re nodding in agreement.

Everyone needs more leads, and hence everyone needs a more effective sales funnel.

New Challenges B2B Businesses Are Facing

As the web-based marketing is growing and maturing, so do both challenges and opportunities for B2B businesses.

On the one hand, more and more brands need services, so there’s definitely a growing demand for B2B businesses, especially now that the COVID-triggered digitalization is disrupting the global economy.

Experts are realizing this and have started monetizing their personal brands by providing services. Hence the fast-growing competition.

As the competition is becoming more complex and diverse, so do B2B customers.

In the B2B sector, there always were several decision makers involved. What is changing is the structure of decision-making units (DMUs). These days there are many more people involved—an average DMU grew from 4 to 7 people in two years.

A DMU typically consists of several people including the marketing manager, the business development manager, the brand manager, etc.. Obviously, each of them will have different needs which your marketing strategy should address.

At the same time, the B2B buying journey is becoming less predictable and more complicated. It is claimed to have become twice as long in 6 years and I am pretty sure it grew much more in 2020 when online marketing has grown exponentially.

So the question arises. How do you generate and convert leads in today’s rapidly evolving marketing climate?

There are, of course, many ways: from re-focusing your services to meet new needs, to creating more content to generate leads organically. And yet, there’s one fundamental step just about every B2B business needs to take care of prior to taking another action:

Optimize your sales funnel.

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Here are a few tools that can help:

1. Diversify Your Lead Generation Methods

Have you noticed your old lead generation methods losing their efficiency? You are not alone. If 10 years ago a simple contact form on your “Services” page was enough to get links (provided there was any traffic coming to that page), these days web users seem to be developing web form blindness.

Web literacy is growing, and so do privacy concerns. It’s getting harder and harder to convince your site visitors to share their email with you and agree to getting contacted. Here are a few ideas for you to diversify your lead generation methods:

Chatbots

With Artificial Intelligence on the rise, there are quite a few solutions allowing you to easily create a smart chatbot which will be sending your site users down the sales funnel.

By answering their questions and sending them relevant links, a smart chatbot will always be there where it’s needed, helping your site visitors navigate your site more confidently so they trust you with their contact information.

Appointment Scheduling Software

Some leads may not even need to become leads. Shorten their buying journey by allowing them to become your customers right away, i.e. let them schedule a meeting with you without requesting one.

Appointfix is one of the easiest and most affordable tools allowing you to create on-page CTAs that lets site users schedule an appointment and get confirmed right away:

AI-Powered Surveys

Somehow people like taking polls and even quick surveys, especially if they expect to see the answer breakdown in the end. This makes surveys a great lead generation method.

AI-facilitated online surveys convert your site users into leads even more effectively by identifying when each individual user is more inclined to engage and which topics will catch their attention.

Traditional Lead Magnets

Content strategy should include diverse content types targeting all different people within one decision-making unit. Normally, a decision-making unit consists of various executives like the managing director, the head of marketing, and of the head of sales.

Naturally each of them will have their own needs from any product. An effective content strategy should address this divergence in organizational and personal priorities of each persona inside a DMU. Customer-facing lead magnets include:

• demonstrations
• whitepapers
• customer references
• webinars
• videos
• value assessment tools
• product brochures, etc.

Visitor Identification Software

Finally, not all site users will entrust you with their contact information. But they can still become a lead. Maybe the timing was wrong, or that site visitor was distracted, or maybe that’s just the wrong player inside this DMU.

You can still catch many of those leads by using visitor identification software. These tools collect your site logs and identify companies behind many of them.

Invest in Paid Lead Generation Methods

While on-site (i.e. “inbound”) lead generation tactics should be your priority, using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter ads will expand your reach and accumulate more data for you, so don’t miss this step! Social listening is another great step to take.

2. Collect and Nurture Leads Automatically

The sales process normally consists of hundreds of micro-tasks performed by dozens of sales people. It is a nightmare to organize and manage effectively.

Luckily, there are new tools coming to the market that allow you to keep things well-organized and streamlined by applying artificial intelligence.

Exceed.ai is one example of this innovation in action. The platform uses artificial intelligence to engage your leads in personalized and contextual two-way conversations based on CRM data, recent actions and nurture stage. In a nutshell, this is a virtual assistant that works alongside your team to independently assist, qualify, nurture and convert your leads.

Where sales reps may give up or simply overlook things, Exceed picks things up and engages your leads with human-like conversations. Once the AI assistant has qualified a lead for a sales call, it schedules the call for the lead with the relevant rep, again, saving precious time wasted on back-and-forth to set up meetings.

Obviously, there will always be a need for human intervention, but Exceed helps to make that intervention more efficient by making those leads better qualified and more inclined to become your customers, thus increasing your reps overall productivity and success rates.

3. Optimize Your Sales Funnel Using A/B Testing

Conversion optimization is a process which is never finished. You will always look for new ways to design your pages and optimize your flow to achieve better results. This is where constant A/B testing and adjusting comes into play.

Finteza is a web analytics solution that makes sales funnel monitoring and A/B testing doable without investing a separate team to do that.

Conclusion

As more and more companies are permanently switching to remote working, the B2B sector is growing fast. This is a good time to start offering services or launching a SaaS project, and with the tools listed above you can also generate leads and convert them into clients pretty quickly. Good luck!

The post 3 Tools to Build an Effective B2B Marketing Sales Funnel appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

In the past few years, there’s been a debate about the importance of your website’s homepage.

With the variety of ways people navigate the web, some argue that website homepages are seldom the first thing people see anymore. From social media ads that link directly to your landing page or links that go directly to blog content, it’s easy for people to totally circumvent your homepage entirely when they visit your website.

But despite all of that, we would argue that your homepage is still extremely important.

It’s possible that your homepage isn’t the most profitable part of your website. But, when correctly designed, your homepage is definitely the most powerful part of your site.

It’s true.

It is a lot easier now to get people directly to your sales or landing pages. But if we’ve learned anything from the Customer Value Journey, it’s that jumping right to the sale is never the best way to actually get (and keep) a customer.

Think about it. How often do you immediately buy something once you land on a sales or product page? Odds are, you do a little research and look around the website before breaking out your credit card. And this research starts on that company’s homepage.

That’s why your homepage is so important—it provides the basis for your business’s trust factor.

Your homepage should be a multitool in your marketing efforts. It’s not like a sales page or a contact page, where it only has one purpose. For your homepage to be truly effective, it has to do at least these 3 things well:

• Clarify the benefit of your product (and what it is)
• Establish trust
• Point the way

Your homepage probably won’t close a sale, but it can absolutely lose a sale. If someone finds their way to your homepage and can’t understand what you do or don’t like what they see, there’s way less of a chance you’ll get that customer.

Your homepage needs to be clear, concise, and professional. And lucky for you, there’s a few things that everyone can do to optimize their homepage.

Use these 4 tips to turn your homepage from a simple webpage to a powerful business tool.

1. Great Design Won’t Save Bad Copy

When you’re first creating your website homepage, it’s really tempting to get completely focused on how it looks. It’s understandable—a good-looking homepage with a great design not only helps people navigate your site, but it makes your company look extremely professional.

And while both of those things are true, your homepage copy is definitely the thing you should really be investing time into.

To understand this, you need to remember what the #1 point of your homepage is: to clarify the benefit of your product.

No matter how hard you try, design can’t do that as well as copy.

Your homepage may be the driving force of your website, so of course you want it to look good. But you have to remember that looks don’t matter if the customer can’t figure out why they should buy your product in your first place.

To do this, you need to figure out how to sum up your product in an enticing way. What’s the copy you need on your website that will make people read and say, “I have to buy that!”

A little tip from Donald Miller, Founder of StoryBrand, is to not just simply state what your business or product does, but rather lay out the problem it solves.

A great example of clear, concise homepage copy is TurboTax.

In 3 short sentences, TurboTax’s copy lets you know exactly who they are and the problem they solve: “real tax experts” ready to help you as much or as little as you’d like.

This copy clarifies the benefit of using their service, and that doesn’t even include the customer testimonials and satisfaction guarantees further down the page that help establish trust.

This website also has a great call to action, but we’ll talk more about that later on…

If you can make your homepage copy informative, clear, and engaging, it will go a long way in helping you make those sales that might slip through your homepage cracks.

The only catch is, you need to be able to do that quickly…

2. Use the 7-Second Test

With your design and copy in hand, you should be able to make a good draft of your new homepage. Once you do, it’s time to do the 7-second test.

The process is simple. Grab a neutral observer, someone who’s unfamiliar with your business, and have them look at your homepage. For your homepage to pass the test, they should be able to tell you 3 things in 7 seconds or less:

• What your product is and what problem it solves
• Why they should care
• What you want them to do next

These are the 3 things that, from looking at your homepage, you want your customer to immediately know and understand about your business.

You have a very limited time to catch your customer’s attention and tell them about your business. The internet is a big place, and failing to make an immediate good impression on your visitors is going to make them go somewhere else.

Studies as recently as 2020 show that people, on average, spend just under 15 seconds on a website. To be truly effective, it’s best to aim to get their attention (and your point across) in half that time.

Because if you can accomplish that in 7 seconds, then they can spend the remaining 7 judging if your site appears trustworthy. If you get them to stay past 15 seconds, then you’ll know you have a pretty good chance at getting a new customer.

3. Clarify Your Audience

When you’re designing your homepage and writing your copy, it’s important to keep your ideal customer in mind.

Anyone can visit your website, which is why most companies look to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible. If you can make a good impression on a wide range of people, the more likely it is you’ll make a wide range of sales. Right?

Wrong.

You shouldn’t be trying to sell to everyone. You want to sell to your target audience, your customer avatar. Anyone else who buys is just the cherry on top.

So, how do you do this? And how does this fit on your homepage?

For starters, you should know exactly who your ideal customer is. You should know their hopes, dreams, fears, pain points, and interests. Once you have that comprehensive understanding, then you’ll know exactly how to reach them.

The broader purpose of clarifying your audience is so you can use that knowledge when crafting your messaging.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples:

Wicked Reports, a service that helps businesses optimize their ad spend and maximize ROI, has a really good homepage. Because they know exactly who they’re selling to: ecommerce marketers.

If you’re an ecommerce marketer looking for some help with lead generation and acquisition, you’ll immediately know that you’ve found the right place. The copy tells you instantly the problem that they solve and the solutions that they offer. All above the fold of their homepage.

Last but not least, they have a subtle but effective hero shot: a short video of someone working on their keyboard. There’s no question who Wicked Reports is targeting, and their doing a great job at hitting them with effective messaging.

Another example is popular fitness company Peloton.

Peloton’s copy doesn’t lay out exactly what they do, but it does promise that buying their bike will allow you to “get a head start on your goals.” And if you have any question about what it does, its sliding deck of hero shots answers all of those question by showing in-shape people using their products to exercise.

Peloton is targeting people that want to get or stay in shape. Their visuals do a lot of the heavy lifting to paint the picture of the after-state that their potential customers will find themselves in if they use their products.

Peloton primarily uses their copy to focus on what their customers want to do: get a head start on their fitness goals.

Understanding your customer avatar is key when designing your homepage. If you know who you’re targeting, then you can create an effective page that speaks to them.

4. Choose a Primary Call to Action

Last but not least, make sure you have a really good CTA on your website.

Your CTA is the most important part of your homepage because it accomplishes the main goal: pointing the way.

And yes. We mean just a good CTA. Just one.

The reason why is because of the fear of conflicting messaging. If you have a nice-looking homepage that communicates exactly why people should buy your product or engage with your business, the last thing you want to do is confuse them about what to do next.

Here are some good CTAs that you can use on your website:

• Lead magnet opt-In
• Register/join
• Take a quiz or assessment
• Start a demo/trial

You’ll notice that “purchase now” is not included on this list. That’s because, for your homepage, it’s really not an ideal CTA for most businesses.

Again, the point of your homepage isn’t to make a sale. It’s to inform and establish trust with your audience. So, ideally, you want to offer something or tell them do something that’s free.

Let’s look at our examples above.

For TurboTax, their CTA is “start for free.” They key word there that will make people click is “free.”

Wicked Reports, on the other hand, has an opt in. By giving them your name and email, you can get a 3-minute demo video about what you can actually accomplish with their product. This is a simpler version of starting a demo or trial, and it’s also completely free of cost to the customer.

Wicked Reports can then use your contact information to retarget you later if you don’t immediately buy.

Last but not least, we have Peloton.

You’ll notice that Peloton is the exception to this rule. Not only do they have two CTAs, but one of them is to shop for bikes. The other one, their secondary CTA, is simply prompting people to explore their catalog of products and compare pricing.

Why does Peloton do this?

Peloton’s social credibility has already established enough trust in their business that when people land on their homepage, chances are they’re looking at pricing. They also have different CTAs that appear with different hero shots.

Most potential customers know what Peloton is—the company doesn’t need to teach people about their product as much. The actual biggest obstacle for their business is the cost of their product. That’s why their CTAs have people immediately diving in and learning about their pricing.

This strategy works for them, but it definitely won’t work for everyone.

The best practice is to use your CTAs to get people’s information and offer them something for free. If you do that, you’ll have a great shot (at least eventually) at turning them into a paying customer.

Be Flexible

These 4 tips will help anyone create an amazing homepage for their website, but there is one more thing that you should know.

Your homepage shouldn’t stay the same.

Depending on where your business is at in its lifecycle, you may need something totally different out of your homepage than you did 3 months ago. Whether it’s laying out basic information about your product like Wicked Reports or (one day) encouraging people to buy like Peloton, your homepage can do it all. You just need to know when it’s time to make those changes.

That’s why homepages are so powerful—they can do whatever your business needs at that time. So, as your business needs change, your homepage should change too.

Whether you’re creating a homepage for the first time or updating your homepage for the 100th time, these tips will always help you optimize it to get and keep more customers. Then all you’ll have to do is sit back and watch your website make more sales and generate more leads.

The post 4 Tips for Crafting Your Perfect Website Homepage appeared first on DigitalMarketer.